Tobacco products: advertising and sponsorship by press, radio, television

Stressing the relevance of using Article 100a as the legal basis, the rapporteur asked for the amendments aimed at changing this legal basis to be rejected. As for the rest of the common position, which took on board most of the amendments tabled by Parliament at first reading, Mr Cabrol said that this represented considerable progress in relation to the previous position and was therefore the best compromise possible, allowing all the necessary economic adjustments. It was, in any case, the result of nearly ten years of discussions. As a consequence, he was totally against the prospect of postponing this directive sine die and rejected en masse the amendments tabled by certain colleagues which, in his opinion, were pretexts aimed at making the whole procedure fail. Commissioner Flynn stated that the text of the common position reflected the spirit of the initial proposal. As for Article 100a, he pointed out that this had previously been used in the case of tar content labelling for cigarettes and to ban TV advertising and indirect advertising. Mr Flynn was also against subsidies being granted to tobacco production which caused so much suffering and so many deaths. For the same reason, any advertising of this product was unjustified. The Commission therefore agreed with the common position as adopted and accepted by the rapporteur.